In retail store robotics applications, autonomous robots traverse a store performing one or more missions that involve analysis of the store shelf contents. Such missions may require capturing high resolution images of the shelves for reading barcodes and/or capturing low resolution images to generate aisle images. One such mission is to read barcodes that are present on the shelf edges to determine exactly how products are arranged in the store.
This disclosure and the exemplary embodiments described herein provide a system and method to determine where products are missing from the shelves for restocking purposes. The disclosed system and method use a vertically oriented LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to capture depth information along the aisle and analyze the results to determine 1) where shelves are along an aisle, 2) locations along the shelf where product is missing, and 3) to indicate the locations along the shelf where promotional tags are presented.